Giovanna Colombetti

Didactics

Neuroscience and Design

II edition

• English

• February 2025

• Interior Design and Architecture

Bio

I am a philosopher of cognitive science, and I work primarily in the field of ‘4E cognition’ (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition). Since my PhD, my research has focused on affectivity and I have worked to reconceptualize various affective phenomena from a 4E-cognition perspective. In both teaching and research I draw liberally on phenomenology, analytic philosophy, as well as theoretical and experimental work in psychology and neuroscience. More recently I have become interested in the contribution that the social sciences and the field of material culture studies can make to our understanding of affectivity, in particular in the context of philosophical debates on the ‘situated’ and even ‘extended’ nature of the mind. I am member of EGENIS, and lead its Mind, Body, and Culture research group. I am also Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Past grants: In 2010-2014 I was the Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council (ERC), titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind” (EMOTER). This project focused primarily on so-called “embodied” and “enactive” approaches in the philosophy of cognitive science. These approaches have emphasized that to explain and understand mental phenomena we need to look at the whole organism; studying the brain only is not sufficient. My project EMOTER expanded upon this view, elaborating its implications for our understanding of various affective phenomena (such as emotions, moods, feelings), and of the relation between cognition and affectivity. My book The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (2014, MIT Press) presents and discusses most of the ideas developed during this project.